CSICOP becomes CSI after thirty years

Name change reflects growth, focus on science and reason

Amherst, N.Y. (Nov. 30, 2006)—After three decades of baring questionable fringe- and pseudoscience claims to the objective eye of the scientific method, the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal has officially changed its name. The familiar moniker, CSICOP, has been halved to CSI—pronounced C-S-I—and now stands for the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry.

The change comes, in part, due to the prominence of the word “paranormal” in the well-known acronym. Executive Council member Kendrick Frazier, editor of Skeptical Inquirer magazine, said the reference sometimes led those unfamiliar with the group to narrowly limit their concept of the organization’s goals. Also, misconceptions of motives had to be continually corrected.

“It always required an explanation that we weren't the promoters of the paranormal but the scientific investigators, the critical evaluators,” Frazier writes in the January/February 2007 issue of Skeptical Inquirer. “Our goal has been to provide scientific examinations of these claims, so that reliable, fact-based, verified information can be used in making judgments about them.”

CSI Chairman Paul Kurtz, founder of the Center for Inquiry, emphasized that, although CSI will remain true to its early CSICOP mission, the organization has never confined itself exclusively to the investigation of paranormal claims. CSI will continue to deal with a wider range of topics emerging in the contemporary world, such as unfounded ethical opposition to stem cell research.

“Today there are new challenges to science,” Kurtz writes in Skeptical Inquirer. “Yet powerful moral, theological, and political forces have opposed scientific research on a whole number of issues.”

The decision to shorten the 10-word name was rendered Sept. 23 at an Executive Council meeting in Oak Brook, Ill. The name becomes official once the appropriate legal papers have been filed and processed.